it's great we have so many choices how to control our tanks, and we can each make the choices that best suit our own personal needs.
For me, as i know it is for probably 10's of thousands of others, it's important to have a single programming interface that is capable of not only controlling my lights (radion pro g3), but my powerheads, return, skimmer, skimmer cleaner, reactors, doser, work lights, physical feed buttons i built into the side of my cabinet, leak detection monitors, and auto top offs, while providing a secondary system to continually monitor my temperature, salinity, ph and orp, then be able to immediately take action to turn on/off or change the state of most any device in my setup, as well as notify me via email/txt so i can remotely login and see what exception has occurred, then manually intervene as needed even when i'm not at home. With my small ups, my apex also handles notifying me of power outages, shutting down the least critical components to save power if say only 1 of my 2 circuits is down, and making the best of a bad situation in my absence. Only an apex provides that broad level of functionality for those of us that desire putting all the pieces together, across many different manufacturers beyond just primary lighting and internal powerhead support that others provide.
I would not have recently purchased my radions or mp40ws if they had not been "apex ready" -- announced and certified as such by both ecotech marine and neptune.